Hydrogen Safety Management – Essential Practices for Risk Management in Operational Facilities

Even though the thrust and focus to move the hydrogen production to green hydrogen and blue hydrogen is kicking off, the risk of handling high pressure and high volume of hydrogen remains unchanged. It will take time for the transition to happen, and it is also imperative that these facilities will be operational for near future particularly in developing countries. Considering that the most operational facilities were set up at least twenty years ago, it is always challenging to manage the risk during operations and maintenance. This paper elaborates the risk management themes (assessing the risk; conduct of operations; asset integrity practices; transportation safety; fire detection, prevention, and protection practices etc.) to present the major safety challenges and the essential safety practices for operational Hydrogen generation units.

The analysis has been carried out based on various risk consulting services (E.g., Process Hazard Analysis, Functional Safety Assessments, Design of fire prevention and protection systems, Process safety management implementation, etc.) provided by Cholamandalam MS Risk Services for traditional Hydrogen generation units (across industrial sectors like Petroleum Refining, Fertilizer, Methanol, Chlor alkali industries and Thermal power plants). The major safety challenges, and essential safety practices for each of the risk management theme presented in this paper have already been implemented in Asia and found effective in nature. The paper also touches upon the way forward for decommissioning the traditional Hydrogen generation units. The overall idea is to present practicable essential safety practices for traditional Hydrogen manufacturing facilities to manage risk effectively during operation phase.